James Secord has spotted a new genre. His book demonstrates the importance of examining contemporary events as well as sequences of causes and influences, cutting across, as it were, as well as going up and down the tide of time. Focusing upon Britain in the years just around 1830 when Mind was on the March, the dreadful prospect of revolution and atheism loomed, the steam engine brought enormous changes in printing and transport, Nonconformists and then Roman Catholics were enfranchised, and the Reform Bill at last became law, he groups together books which have hitherto been studied in separate and distinct categories. Seen in this light, works by Humphry Davy, Charles Babbage, John Herschel, Mary Somerville, Charles Lyell, George Combe and Thomas Carlyle come together as promoting and criticizing the place of science and its values in national culture. As utilitarian materialism was seen to be on the rise, and as science split into specialisms offering some professional possibilities, so broader visions and big pictures offered by both moderate Tories and reforming Whigs were in demand: the books that Secord studied sold well. He devotes much space to their appearance and cost as indicating target readership, and casting light on publishing and bookselling, as well as on all-pervasive fears of irreligion, countered by emphasis upon general laws in a wonderful and well-ordered universe.

In Secord's view, Davy's Consolations, written at the end of his life and prettily published, posthumously, by Murray, set out the qualities required of a chemical philosopher as well as a progressive geology, while Babbage's Decline of Science was the work of an ‘angry accountant’ (p. 56) with a reform agenda, furious about ‘trimmers', ‘cooks', and shady deals but not really founding a ‘declinist’ party. Herschel's Preliminary Discourse, published by Longman as part of a cheap series edited by the pushy Dionysius Lardner (‘the tyrant’ imposing harsh deadlines), was vocational, not a foundation document for philosophy of science so much as a ‘conduct manual’ for middle-class would-be gentleman natural philosophers, in search of verae causae and true wisdom. Somerville's Connexion of the Physical Sciences, published by Murray, was a triumph in conveying the spirit of mathematics without formulae or diagrams. Like Herschel (and Galileo) she saw mathematics as the key to scientific knowledge, and the emerging ‘classical physics' as the fundamental science – in contrast to Davy, for whom it had been chemistry, newly dynamical in its embrace of electricity. Secord reminds us that when coining the word ‘scientist’ in his review of Somerville's book, Whewell was denigrating mere practitioners who, unlike him or her, were not true natural philosophers – no wonder, then, that the term did not catch on. Her ‘feminine’ characteristics and accomplishments were much dwelt on as exemplary; her bust was commissioned for the Royal Society of which she could not be a fellow.

Lyell's Principles of Geology (also published by Murray), usually studied within the context of that science, becomes for Secord a regulative work. Not written primarily to draw people in, its appeal to a gentlemanly readership lay in its elegant emphasis upon analogies and verae causae, the method being illustrated with judiciously chosen examples. He sees Lyell's horror of Lamarckian transmutation, to which his book called attention, as completely genuine. Geology became indeed one of the leading sciences, and Lyell one of its leading lights; but Combe's Constitution of Man, based upon the subsequently discredited phrenology, became after a false start one of the best-sellers of the century. Published by Chambers in Edinburgh using cheap paper, double columns and small type, it was priced to reach the newly literate working class with its progressive message of the power of science, not only in the industry on which their livelihood depended but also in understanding human behaviour.

Secord's last example is Carlyle's extraordinary Sartor Resartus, with metaphors from tailoring leading into a powerful critique, put into the mouth of a German professor, of the ‘spirit of the age’. It came out in parts, and was disregarded, but its subsequent appearance as a book led to serious engagement, and delight in its pricking of bubbles as Carlyle went on to become a historian and a sage, or public intellectual, in Victorian London. For him, mathematics and mechanics were a matter of grinding, turning their followers into calculating machines: his extraordinary style was far from the elegance of Herschel or Lyell, just as the Gothic buildings that Pugin taught contemporaries to admire and commission were a break with Palladian or Greek Revival balance, suavity and self-satisfaction.

Somerville's reputation depended upon her command of French mathematical advances, particularly in algebraic analysis, which had left her insular male contemporaries far behind. But after 1815 Britons became perforce more aware of Continental advances as they struggled to keep up. Women might, like Somerville, have mastered modern languages while their brothers struggled with Latin and Greek, and have an important role as translators. Thus, in an episode revealing the crucial timeliness of Secord's chosen publications, Oersted's Soul in Nature, a book that seems to belong with Davy's Consolations, was a flop. Oersted was longer-lived than Davy, and by the time the English translation by Leonora and Joanna Horner appeared in 1852, published by Henry Bohn, who made a fortune with remainders and cheap series, the world had moved on and this relic of the Romantic period seemed a mere fossil, an embarrassment.

Catching an important moment in national and in scientific history, Secord makes us think about works with which we may have been separately concerned in a new light, and with new bedfellows. As a prequel to his Victorian Sensation, it is a triumph, showing how Victorian Britain became an Age of Science, and the sciences (for specialization was a great feature of the times) a major part of its culture.